Written by Christopher Kelly
Jan. 15, 2024
Chris:
Hello, and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive podcast. My name is Christopher Kelly. Today, I'm delighted to present to you once again doctor Mike t Nelson, PhD. Mike has spent the last 18 years learning how the human body works, specifically focusing on properly conditioning it to burn fat and to become stronger, more flexible, and healthier. He's been called to share his techniques with top government agencies, universities and colleges, fitness organizations, and fanatics.
The techniques he's developed And the result Mike gets for his clients have been featured in international magazines, scientific publications, and websites across the globe. On the podcast today, Mike talks about his flex diet certification program, a course for trainers, coaches, and fitness enthusiasts on metabolic flexibility, working with clients on nutrition and achieving fitness goals. We also talk about a little bit of everything else. His recent talk at the ISSN conference, Measuring and improving your v o two max, creating training plans, and the best ways to assess for fitness in house band. Mike's flex diet certification program takes students 1 to 2 times a year and is open today through the 22nd January 2024.
So if you're listening to this before the 22nd January 2024, Head over to flexdiet.com where you can sign up for Mike's program. Just before we get into this podcast, I'd like to ask for your help. Our dear friend, colleague, and mentor, doctor Simon Marshall, has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. While Simon is fortunate to have excellent health insurance, The standard care options available for pancreatic cancer can somewhat limit their effectiveness. In their quest for the best possible outcome, Simon and his wife, Les, are exploring new and emerging treatments, therapies, and modalities.
These groundbreaking approaches offer hope, but they come at a significant cost. To meet these costs, Les has set up a GoFundMe campaign linked in the show notes for this episode. Your contribution, whether big or small, will significantly impact Simon's fight against pancreatic cancer. Thanks for your support. Now over to this week's interview with Mike t Nelson.
Well, Mike, thank you so much for joining me this morning. What a privilege to have you again for the 4th time on the Irish branch Oh,
Mike:
it's the 4th time already. That's Crazy. Time already. Yeah.
Chris:
I'm so grateful for experts like you that come on to my show, and you basically give me all of your knowledge for free. And to the listener, that's such an incredible gift, so thank you.
Mike:
Yeah. No problem. Thank you for having me.
Chris:
Tell us about the FlexDart podcast. I've been listening to that a lot recently, And I really like the style. It feels like Mike went to a conference, and he got talking to another one of the speakers and in the back of a taxi or maybe that he would sit beside them in a lecture hall somewhere. And this is just like we're kind of somehow managing to overhear your chat that you had with This other PhD expert person. And I really like that style.
It feels like it's more geared towards coaches. Would you say that's true?
Mike:
Yeah. It's geared more towards Coaches, I'd say intermediate to advanced fitness enthusiasts. And yeah. And thank you for The compliment because I had this idea years ago. Like, I'm sure you had the same idea for your podcast is that I would go to these conferences or you'd have, like, a 3 hour dinner with, you know, so and so.
And I kept thinking for years. I'm like, man, I wish someone could record this because I don't know if people would wanna listen to what I was talking about, but I would wanna hear Other conversations that are happening like this in other locations with other people. And when I started the podcast on my own, I've been on Iron Radio for many years, And I just started my own. It was probably 2 years ago now. And initially, it was very formal, very I had, like, my whole list of Questions.
I remember doing one with Don D'Agostino who I've known for years. And I did all my preparation. I had all my questions. I went back, reviewed all these studies and everything. And he comes on there, and he's like, Yeah.
I just did a 72 hour fast. I'm gonna go deadlift after this. Planet, what do you and I realized at that point that I just Throughout, like, all the questions I had because that was way more interesting. You had all these red lights in the back, and and it was kind of after that I realized I'm like, oh, If I'm bored doing the podcast, like, why am I doing that? Part of it is just my own self interest.
I pay for it. Like, it costs me money. But then to have other people listen in on those conversations and yeah. To me, that's just a lot more fun. I think you get More interesting things from other people that way as opposed to being formulaic.
And if I hear 1 more freaking podcast, it starts out with, Oh, and tell me what it is you do now again, and they just they seem all very formulaic. It's the same thing all the time. It just bores me to tears.
Chris:
That's funny you should say that because I remember in 2014, approaching Dominic D'Agostino at the Ancestral Health Symposium in Berkeley And being all kind of coy and shy and, like, I'd only had a couple of podcast interviews to my name at that time and asking him if he would be on my podcast. And he just said, sure. When you wanna do it? I'm like, my god. This is amazing.
Of course, it and the symposium was just like such a great source of content for the podcast. So, you know, I owe a lot to those conferences for sure.
Mike:
Yeah. They're fun, and Dom's Just great. Like, it's it's super nice down to earth guy, especially for all the stuff that he had done.
Chris:
Yeah. And where can people find you know, I always wonder I hear you to hear talk about these talks that you've given at Conferences, are they ever recorded, and are they available online? Like, I know recently you talked about psychedelics, and I'm like, oh, I wanna watch that talk. How do I see that?
Mike:
What I might do, if people wanna email me. If they wanna see the psychedelic talk, let me know. Unfortunately, a lot of them aren't filmed, which kind of annoys me. But I get it if you're an organization. It's more money, it's more cost, and all that kind of stuff.
But after it's been I don't know what the time lapse is on it, but probably I could probably redo that talk as a screencast if people are interested. So some of them, I might start doing those because, As you know, they like to prepare an actual especially more the formal ish academic talks. It's a pain in the ass to do that. Like, the amount of research and time it takes To do all that is a lot of effort, and it I love doing it. It was great.
It was, you know, very well received, but it it also just seems weird that it's a small audience of only 300 people that get to ever see it.
Chris:
Yeah. Well, that's amazing. I'll tell you a funny story about psychedelics. We've been hosting our house on Airbnb this year on in Santa Cruz. And one time, somebody left some mushrooms in our oven.
Would you believe the family found that said, hey. What are these? And I look at them, and I'm like, Pretty sure I recognize that blue color. You know? Yeah.
So they sat in my drawer for a long time, and then they came out on New Year's Day just 12 days ago as a re recording, we had some friends over, and a couple of us did these mushrooms. We did 3 grams of these dried mushrooms
Mike:
when we went from a log
Chris:
in the redwoods here.
Mike:
Oh, yeah.
Chris:
And it was the man, one of the things I just can't believe I waited this long to try Silas Ibert. Right? It's just absolutely incredible. And, like, one of the standout thing I mean, it wasn't particularly inward and introspective because you've got other people there, and you're talking. And
Mike:
Yeah. And your outside, your eyes are all You're
Chris:
on the outside. Yeah. The visuals are so distracting. But one of the things I remember the most, we have a wood stove that's our only source of heat, and it was kind of a cold day. We're inside towards the end, and I'm sat there just, like, staring at the flames in the wood stove, and everyone's gone quiet.
And I'm looking after actually, another podcast guest, Brianna Stubbs, another ketogenic diet expert. Yeah. You know? Yeah. We were Mhmm.
Dog sitting their dog, this beautiful Labrador named
Mike:
Paul.
Chris:
And it's such an appropriate name. He's like this big cuddly toy. He's only a puppy, but he's still so like, he's really mellow. And just lying there on did we just have single mattress in our living room lying on the mattress, like, snuggled up to Teddy, looking at the flames. This is like the most anti depressing.
You know, like, it's The most amazing healing thing. I can't but give us the abstract. Can you give us the 32nd summary of your talk on psychology?
Mike:
Yeah. I did it for the National Society of Sports Nutrition. And Okay. The main reason I did it is because hopefully later this year, depending on, you know, a lot of places have decriminalized it. But in terms of
Chris:
FDA approval. From licensed Santa Cruz, by the way.
Mike:
Yeah. That's very true. Lot of places are. Yeah. And, hopefully, FDA will approve for certain indications, for certain compounds.
Who knows what'll 1st, but I just felt like especially going to the ISSN conference, like, I always love going to those conferences because you see what is the newest things. Like, what are the latest and greatest? And I realized a lot of people in that space have the ability to educate other people, you know, their whether it's academic research or trainers, coaches. And then it was an area that there just Isn't a lot of what I feel like good education on based on the research? And so that was kind of the main reason I did it.
I did this as a crash course on Psychedelics in general. Like, what are the different classifications? What are some of the indications? What are some of the mechanisms of how They might work, what are some of the risks, and, you know, what are some of the rewards? Because I feel like in at least in the US, we don't Have a very good container or very good structure for the use of them outside of a clinical setting.
And, of course, once they're Approved for clinical use. There's obviously places where it's decriminalized. There's gonna be used in other areas, which again, I'm not against at all. But it just seems like people are not Educated on what are the potential pros and the potential risks. And, like, every so often I hear people like, Oh, yeah.
We're just gonna go to this Ayahuasca ceremony in our apartment this weekend, and I'm like, what are you thinking? I don't know. I just get Nervous that a lot of the very good potential and a lot of very good research could potentially be squashed by People doing things that they just had no business doing.
Chris:
Yeah. I don't think of the mushrooms as like that. I find them very gentle, And I don't think there's any known toxicity. I don't and there's no puking,
Mike:
no shitting. It was so silent that there isn't any there isn't any acute Toxicity, you know, the issues you run into with as anything that alters your senses depending upon the dose, depending upon location, set and setting, all that kind of stuff. You could be getting information that's not there that could result in harm. Again, what setting are you in? Right?
Are you gonna, you know, watch the ocean off the Side of a cliff and take 4 grams? Oh. Probably a very horrible idea. Right?
Chris:
I did worry.
Mike:
In the middle of the woods, somewhere else. Yeah. So I'm watching it.
Chris:
Yeah. Like, lighting the stove. At one point, I thought, am I lighting a fire inside the stove? Hopefully. Exactly.
Having a babysit is not
Mike:
a bad idea. Oh, very good idea. Yeah. Because even just the psychic Stress of it knowing, especially if you don't have any experience with things, to not know what you're gonna know. And to me, Doing that kind of by yourself to me is a very high risk even of it the experience itself go in a different direction.
Right? Because you're in each stress level, you're Worried about what may happen versus being in a very controlled set and setting, people there who have experience, there's people watching you. They've done this before. They know what's going on. To me, that's just a very different potential both for risk and even outcome.
Because how I think about it is that there's no Good or bad trips per se, but there's definitely safe and unsafe ones. And so your goal is to just make sure it's a safe experience. What'll happen well, is what'll happen, but if it's a safe environment and everything is set up that way, you know, at the end of that experience, you'll still be okay.
Chris:
Talk about the flex diet certificate certification. Who's it for? I wonder whether it's for me. You know, I've been coaching, recording the podcast for 10 years now. And I'm just wondering if if someone like me and I we have clients like me.
Right? Like, they have this incredible health transformation, and they wanna help other people achieve what they've achieved. And I'm wondering whether the Flex diet certification would be for them. But what would they be able to do once they have the certificate that they wouldn't have been able to do before?
Mike:
Yeah. It's basically a certificate for nutrition coaching. We do do some recovery. So we do talk a little bit about basic exercise and sleep and some other things. And I initially set it up because, as you know, the world in nutrition is super confusing, and everyone has kinda
Chris:
their shoot. Yeah.
Mike:
They're all up the
Chris:
air is on. You know, like sleep, I find that
Mike:
Oh, everything is that right now.
Chris:
Oh, you think even sleep is like okay.
Mike:
Yeah. Even sleep is that way. Initially, I set it up as because I was doing a lot of, you know, training with CrossFit gyms and bigger gyms. And I would go to a gym and I'd be like, hey. What are you doing for programming?
And, you know, a lot of better gyms had that all figured out. And I would always ask them, like, hey. What are you guys doing for nutrition? And they're like, well, I don't know. This 30 day challenge and that 30 day challenge, and it just seemed weird that even in that controlled setting, There wasn't anything that was being done.
And most of it wasn't scalable, and no one really knew where to start, so they would just throw 30 day challenges at them. So I'm like, could I come up with a system where 1 person in that gym would be in charge of all the nutrition work? But, yeah, it would still be semi customizable. So I would say start in this direction, but yet per individual, it'd be semi customizable because everyone's gonna be a little bit different. And I set it up with the concepts of metabolic flexibility and flexible dieting, so it is a more flexible approach.
And then within that, you learn the big picture, Like, how those concepts work. And then there's 8 interventions that I had. With 8 intervention, I limited myself to only 1 hour of technical stuff. So I had 1 hour to tell you technically what you need to know about protein from leucine, essential amino acid, protein muscle synthesis, blah blah blah. Explain it in English so someone could actually understand what was going on.
And then there's 5 action items per each area. So within the system, you would learn the overall concept. You would learn enough of the details of what's going on per intervention based on research, but then you would know exactly what to do with the person sitting in front of you. Okay. You're gonna work on this action step.
You're gonna do this for this period of time. Cool. Once we got that, we're gonna go on to the next one. So So I took the psychology aspects of it and more or less baked that into the system so that they didn't have to get overwhelmed by that at the same time. It's still there.
It's still flexible. It's still kind of a client led approach, but that's all baked into the system. Because, ironic, the feedback I got from most Trainers, at least people who were communicating with me was, I just don't know enough about nutrition to do it. And the reality is they probably do, But they didn't have a system, and they didn't have a way of navigating. Okay.
I start here. I do this, and I do that. Okay. But why am I doing those things? In what order am I doing it?
So, like, for example, a lot of people would start with sleep. They would be like, well, look at all this great research on sleep, and Well, clients don't sleep enough and a 100% true. Like, no argument on that. But as you know, at some point, you can only maximize the quality of somebody's sleep So high? If they're sleeping 5 hours a night, they probably need 6 or 7 or 8 hours of sleep.
There's isn't a real way around it. At the end of the day, you're like, oh, so that the 2 hours I watch Netflix with my spouse at night, you're telling me I should just go to bed. Yeah. You're not gonna put your kids up for adoption. You're not gonna, you know, not Go to your job.
You're you're gonna still train. You have all these other things of way your life is set up. And so now I'm telling them to do the one thing that they enjoy To not do that and to go sleep more. So it's a very it's extremely difficult argument. So in terms of the psychological ability of the client to change, Sleep on the one to 8 ratio, that was dead last.
Yeah. Physiologically, lots of good reasons. So but if you contrast that to protein, which is the first intervention, Lots of good reasons you should eat more protein, especially for fat loss. Do you tell someone, hey. I want you to eat more of this specific thing.
Like, we'll
Chris:
say why you're eating now in this area
Mike:
of protein. With you? What you're crazy person. But, like, well, can you do that? Like, oh, yeah.
I can do that. Yep.
Chris:
That's great. I love that. And I know the courses it only opens a couple of times of years. Right? And it's about to open soon.
Mike:
Yeah. They'll be open January 15th through January 22, 2024. Yeah. So they'll be open for a week. Just go to flexdiet.com.
Chris:
Okay. And I'm gonna work super hard to get this podcast out by then, but if by any chance, it's a day late. Like, if it's a day late, well, like, people hearing this, could you give him, like, a code or something like a magic keyword to say the
Mike:
code here? And I mean, I normally don't do exceptions outside of the time course, but They can email me and tell me they heard it on this podcast, and I'll make an exception for them. So that way only people will listen to me about that.
Chris:
Okay. Excellent. Well, I'd love to talk to you about some of these biometric fancy devices that you've been talking about the podcast recently over Yeah. Spanning several episodes, I'd say, and hoping you're gonna be up for for talking about that resting metabolic ray and v o two max and
Mike:
Yeah.
Chris:
Yeah. Fat burning and HIV. You up for talking about some of these things?
Mike:
Yeah. Should.
Chris:
Excellent. Well, I guess before, like, I ask you any questions, I have to sort of state a goal. I feel like that's important always in coaching, like, what are you trying to achieve? And NBC has always been about performance. That's the I find the easiest way to, like, sell someone on any intervention is to an athlete, and it's about performance.
Yes. But, You know, when you work with people for a while, and I've got to this stage too, you eventually get to this point. In the beginning, like, performance is so exciting when You don't know what you're capable of. But once you get to a point, right, you're like, well, I kinda know what's here. Right?
Probably more training is not gonna Do that much. Right? Like, I found my peak potential. And then people, I think, they predictably have this sort of crisis. I had a client say to me once, The juice is not worth the squeeze.
And I thought that's exactly right, isn't it? The amount of time I put into this is just not really worth it to me anymore. And then, like, the goal shifts, right, more towards healthspan. How can I I've improved a lot over the years? How can I keep this game going for as long as possible?
And I guess that's the game of Healthspan. So I think it's slight fair for most of the people listening that would be true. Right? Like and and and so then I'm interested in, you know, obviously, exercise is a part of that, and I'm interested in devices that might help me towards that goal of health span. Does that sound like a reasonable goal?
Mike:
Yeah. I think of it as Every physical quality is gonna have a certain peak, and depending upon what it is, you have your reward versus your risk of doing that? And then per individual, where do you wanna put your time? Then at some point, like you said, you are gonna hit a peak. And by definition of a peak is there's another downside.
So can you not have your downside go off a cliff? And can you kinda make Yeah. You might be losing a little bit of ground over time, but you're gonna try to minimize that rate of loss. You're it's the it's It's the ever ending fight against entropy.
Chris:
Businesses like that as well. Shit.
Mike:
Totally hard. Life is like that.
Chris:
Your job is Okay. So optimizing the health span. Maybe these are bad questions that you can maybe you can help me on these. Right? Right?
So I I think, like, where am I now? And then there's a kind of the corollary to this, which is, am I getting better? I'm interested in any device that can answer those questions. And then there's a sort of the micro level. Right?
Maybe that's the macro level. The micro level is, what should I do? What workout should I do today? Like, that's a question that I always have. And another one is, am I doing it right?
Right? I'm working with Mike, so I know what I'm doing today, but Mike's not here right now, and I don't know if I'm doing it right. You know? Like so maybe if you agree that those are reasonable questions, then we can talk about some of those devices and how They can help me answer some of those questions. What do you think?
Mike:
Yeah. I would agree. And I would say the overarching thing is what do you wanna do? So for, like, with clients, like, if they come to me and say, okay. My number one goal is I wanna maximize the health span as much as possible, and we're just looking at Training.
Okay. Well, what do we know about that? We know that the top 3 that we have pretty good data are VO two max, grip strength, lower body muscle mass, and strength. Right. Someone else, like for me personally, yeah, I wanna do good on those things, but my main goal is more kiteboarding, hit a 30 foot jump.
I mean, performance goals within that are to pick up the 175 pound Thomas inch dumbbell. So those are my overarching two goals. Within that, I'll be 50 this coming year. Obviously, I wanna do those things as long as possible. And in my brain, if I can keep doing those things as long as possible, That has a lot of other, you know, longevity benefits associated because the things I need me to do that have, you know, lower body strength, grip strength, VO two max are kinda baked into those goals also.
But to me, those goals are more interesting, and it's something, like you said, I will Train and put the effort for as opposed to just increase your VO two max. It's like
Chris:
What for? Yeah.
Mike:
Yeah. What for? Right? Well, why do I wanna do that? Oh, because so I can go ride for 5 hours and not worry about being tired.
Okay. Cool. Now I'll do it.
Chris:
Yeah. That's why I say, like, it's only it's, like, very hard to sell things It's set in the context of performance. Right? It's like Yep. Yeah.
And I know I have some covert goals like that, but I feel like they're gonna be less relevant the listener, as kiteboarding is, right, like, I like to I only go a couple times a year, but I've been surfing loads recently. And so that's one of my got, like, how do I not get beat up when I, I get go over the falls and get, like, smashed into, like, head foot high wave into, like, relatively still water and then put through the ringer as it, like, the whole wave unfolds. How do I not get injured there? And then also the Brazilian jiu jitsu that I talked about with Rob Wolf. So I'm sure everybody has something like that.
Right? Like, they everyone cares about health span, But then the other they also have some other sub goals as well. Talk about VO two max then. Do I have to, like, go into a lab and measure? I've heard you talk about this device.
What is it? Yeah. Can it is it reliable? Is it accurate? Is it validated?
Like, tell me about that.
Mike:
Yeah. So there's a couple ways. So VO two max's listeners know The maximum volume of oxygen you can run through your system at once. And if you don't have a fancy device, you can do a 12 minute Cooper run test. So go out, run 12 minutes.
How far did you go in exactly 12 minutes? You can use a concept 2 rower. You can do a 2 k, so 2,000 meter row. Get on there. Warm up.
Go as hard as you can for 2,000 meters. Go online. It'll give you, you know, what your VO two max is. There's a old school YMCA step test and some stuff like that. So those would be kinda more indirect methods We're not actually measuring any oxygen that your body is using.
We're looking at your performance outcome, and then we're looking at this Munch of data and we're saying, okay, here's about where you were at. If you get something called let's call it indirect calorimetry or a metabolic heart Where people seen, you know, the treadmill test, the person with the, you know, the mask over themselves, that's actually measuring the amount of oxygen and measuring the amount of c o two. And so what we said is the definition of a VO two max. So it's the volume, the maximum amount of oxygen you can consume at once. So you would do some type of progressive ramp test.
You have the device, and then the device is measuring the amount of CO two that is produced And the amount of oxygen that's going and being used. And then you can look at the data, and you would see an actual measurement of your VO two max. So it's more of the direct way of measuring what your VO two max is. And then Panoe is a company, but I do some affiliate work for them. They do have a metabolic heart that is quite a bit more inexpensive than ones.
The ones I used in the lab when I was in my PhD, I've done hundreds of metabolic heart tests. They're probably 40 to 50000 a piece For just a piece of equipment. And so the Pinoye is quite a bit less than that. I don't know exactly what the cost is right now, to be honest, but it's in the 1,000. It's under 10,000.
It does appear to be accurate. There's 2 studies that they did. They did a validation study. It was pretty close. There was another independent study that just came out a little while ago That showed it was relatively close.
The caveat with that study is if you want to know the fuel usage, So if you wanna know, are you burning carbohydrates? Are you burning fat? You probably have to do another step of what's called a gas calibration. So with the Pinoy device, you will run a set amount of known gas through it before you start a test, And that will calibrate the device a little bit more accurately than just running it off of ambient air. If you look at that subportion in that study, It was within the ballpark of the other devices.
Now the hard part about any of those comparisons is you're always just comparing to other devices. There you know, in those studies, there isn't really like a quote, unquote gold standard. You're just seeing how do these other I think it's 12 or 14 devices agree with each other.
Chris:
And so this is something I mean, even the Panoe devices is probably not something I'm gonna buy for myself at home as an individual. Right?
Mike:
The good part about it is so one of the I've been using it for I got one that come out 4 years ago. And one of my biggest issues with it was not necessarily the device, the all metabolic hearts to some degree are a little bit finicky, is that, Initially, you just got the raw data. That was it. And I've spent too many years staring at, you know, spreadsheets of raw data. So for me, it was no big deal.
But if you didn't have a background in training, it was all great. I got a bunch of raw data. Like, what the hell does any of this mean? It's just watching, like, the matrix go across the screen. And so they've gotten a lot better now with the reports of saying, hey.
We interpreted all your data now, and here's these different markers from metabolic Efficiency, VO two max, all these other things. And what's cool now is if you have a company, say, for example, a lot of wellness clinics now are Measuring RMR and VO two max, which is awesome because those are good markers for metabolic health. But a lot of the staff there are just not Trained to look at those numbers because that's a, you know, separate field and exercise fizz. So now you can work with Pinoye, and they have an option where You can literally send it to their data experts, and they can even talk to your clients and explain to them what's going on. They can send you the finished reports back.
So the nice part is they've offloaded a lot of the data analysis portion now, which you as a clinician or anyone makes it much easier because now you run the test, it It goes up to the cloud. You can even have someone talk to one of their exercise physiologists, but you get the data that is meaningful to you in your clinical practice. And so that, I think, is actually super cool because one of the issues was, I got all this raw data. What does it mean? And then too, how the hell do I explain any of this to a client that's in front of me?
And that takes a lot of time to to just do those things Even once you have the skill set, but now a lot of that can be done for you. Obviously, there's a price for that, but I think that's kind of a cool option.
Chris:
My experience working with clients, whenever you show them a number like this, the the first thing they're gonna say is, what does this mean? And you just explain how you can figure out what this means. And then the gonna ask, is this any good? How will you know like, are the reference ranges, like, for Correct. Are they sex divided?
Okay. So tell us about the reference ranges.
Mike:
They have a little scorecard, so they have this little bar graph from, like, 1 to 10 in each one of these areas, and it'll tell you where you're at relative to population. Like most of this, they've got actually pretty good data. There's tons of great data on VO two max and other metrics. And the nice part is that You can then look. And so I ran into this early with clients too of like, oh, man.
I think their VO two max is horrible, but the first thing I would do is test it. And then I would show them, hey. Here's your number. Right? Even if I was just doing a 2 k on the rower at the time before I had a device, and then it would show them how they rate it compared to a population.
Because even me just telling them that it's poor doesn't register. But I said, like, hey. We had a client couple years ago. She was in the bottom 10% of a population for VO two max. I'm like, here's where you're at.
I'm not trying to make you feel bad. This is your data. This is your physical output. This is where you're at. Just It's like, oh my god.
I didn't realize it was that bad. And so it's just like, well, how do I improve it? Right? So I think by showing people data, If it's low, then we'll say, okay. Well, how do I improve it?
So on a VO two max may be good, but maybe your respiratory rate is off or maybe there's other things you can work on. And again, like all things like performance, having this pre and post because you can remeasure it, and you can show, hey. You know, you actually did get better in this. Even though you hate cardiovascular training, we've been working hard at it for 8 or 12 weeks, you did get better in these measurements. So your output is actually getting better.
You can see that you're actually getting an improvement because sometimes you can feel it when you go from a low VO two max to a higher number, But it's nice to have those numbers in front of you to be like, oh, wow. Okay. All that effort that I didn't really like doing, it was worth it, and I can see that I'm actually physically better.
Chris:
And so how much can you change it? You know, as always, obviously, there's tons of oodles of the entire literature on this, but Yep. I was already almost under the impression that At least from a sports performance perspective, you know, if you were I guess not v o two max is not it's like maybe 1 leg of the stool in most sports. You know? Like, I'm thinking pick around an example, cyclocross.
Right? Like
Mike:
Yep. I don't care
Chris:
what your VO two max is. If you crash your bike on the 1st corner or if you get a flat tire because you didn't prepare your bike very well, You're still gonna lose. Right? Like, the VO 2 max alone is obviously not enough. But how much can it be trained?
You know, I just always Seemed it was largely determined by genetics. There wasn't much you could do.
Mike:
So VO two max is super interesting because on one hand, you're A 100% correct, but yet it's trainable. So what that means is there is an extremely high genetic component to v o two max. Can look at the heritage study that was done at the University of Minnesota. Depending on what study you read, what sub analysis you read, who do you believe, Maybe 50 to 70% of VO two max is just straight out of the gate genetic. And what you'll find is that you find Younger endurance athletes who just by virtue of their age have a crazy high VO two max.
So the rumor which you probably heard about Lance Armstrong is that I think it was, like, 17 or 18, you know, walked into Cole's lab in Texas. And he's like, I bet I have the highest VO two max of anyone you've ever tested. And so the guy who was running the lab, you know, goes to Cole, and he's like, yeah. There's this kid out here who says he has, like, the highest VO two max we've ever seen. Like, what do you want me to do with them?
And he's like, we'll measure them. He's like, oh, okay. And it was, I don't know, like, 70 or something like that. Yeah. So very, very high.
Obviously, just by being very young, You could not have had enough time training to get to that number. So there is a very high genetic component to it. But a better question then is, okay, if you're not one of the genetic freaks who has that, there's a second component to that where if you have a very high VO two max, The percentage of what you can use of that VO two max, a lot of times, may not be real high. So, again, to your point about VO two max is one of the things I would look at for performance, but it's not the greatest thing for performance. Right?
Because otherwise, when Lance Armstrong, for example, switched from cycling to the marathon, He would have destroyed everyone in the marathon, which didn't happen. He did well, but he didn't destroy everyone just because he had a really high VO two max. So helpful, but not the be all end all. Again, there isn't probably 1 parameter that will predict all sports performance anyway. But the other question then is Okay.
So if, like, for example, I definitely did not win the genetic lottery for any v o two max numbers at all, period. Next question is how trainable is it? And it turns out it's Extremely trainable up to a point. So I would argue that most people with training could probably hit Fifty, you know, milliliters per KG per minute, which is pretty high, but not crazy high. It's not a lead athlete status by any means, but It's higher compared to where most people would start, but with months to many years of training, I think it's something that most people could do.
If you think about muscle mass, right, muscle mass is something that's very trainable, but there's definitely gonna be some genetic freaks who are gonna get much higher than other people Even if everything else was the same. But 50 is probably a pretty good number. If you look at the longevity data, You probably don't need to go, you know, much higher than that. So it is very trainable, and most people I find respond more Similarly to aerobic training than they do strength training. Like strength training, I find there's just a lot more variability in program design and how people respond to stuff, their history, and everything else.
I find the response to aerobic training tends to be shorter, meaning you could take someone who let's say their VO two max. I've had people come in. Their VO two max is, like, 31. And within two and a half years, they've gotten close to 50. Right?
Now it's pretty dedicated program. That's them doing a lot of training. That's a lot of work. But it's within a few years. If you said, I wanna maximize your muscle mass naturally, you're talking decades.
Right? You're not talking a couple years. So I do think it is more trainable than most things. It does take time and effort. The other argument I would make is that once you get to a certain level, It doesn't take nearly as much like all things to hold that amount.
So I don't make an argument for
Chris:
keeping one you got it, can you keep it? Does it take as much worse to hang on to it?
Mike:
Not much. Like and we see this as a muscle mass too. Right? The longer it takes you to attain something, that slope is also much more gradual on the other side, And, you know, assuming any injuries or bed rest or extreme circumstances.
Chris:
That's so interesting, isn't it? Yeah. I feel that's been that my experience too. You know, I used to perform a a high level and do, like, Twenty to 30 hours a week of training, and I still feel like I could go out and ride my bike 5 hours a day having not really done much of anything recently and be absolutely fine. And, You know, other people would be, like would think that was a big deal.
Like, other people I was riding with were like, this is Yeah.
Mike:
Totally. Don't
Chris:
know if I can do it. That's just so interesting. But I guess a lot of that is the genetic thing as well. Right?
Mike:
It is. But you you know right away if you're a genetic freak or not in most of those things. Right? I mean, if you're that high, odds are your Endurance has always just been easy for you. Then if you're not, I would say just, you know, get a test, see where you're at, You know, try to get better.
And the curve at least for longevity stuff and, like, the JAMA study, and Peter t has talked about this too. There's a huge difference from going from completely sucky to just being average. Like, you get a lot of pickup from that. Do you get a little bit more from going average to being, you know, more towards the high level athlete, but not elite? Yes.
Do you get a lot of pickup if you wanted to go from high level athlete elite athlete, really? And you're probably not gonna get there, to be honest. Most people probably won't.
Chris:
And what about cyclists? I know there's a lot of cyclists listening, myself included. Is Sir, you know, you mentioned running. You mentioned rowing. Is there a way to cook?
So if I know how many watts I produce average over 20 minutes and I know my body weight, is there a way for me to convert that to the max?
Mike:
There probably is, but then for whatever's screwball reason, I can't find a good formula.
Chris:
Like, I can't find a good formula.
Mike:
Like, I can find No. It's weird. If someone has it, like, please send it. I'm sure there's some cyclists out there who's tracked every ounce on their bike and their, you know, Functional power output since 1984 that's gonna send me a link to it. But I It's probably built into Straub or, like, gomme or that I'd like to You can find numbers 100%.
Like, there's tons of things that give you numbers. I just I can't seem to find one that I would say is based on a reliable dataset, Unfortunately, which seems weird because cycling's the most, like, heavily data driven sport, I think, on the face of the planet.
Chris:
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Everyone's running a power meter now. Oh, yeah.
Of running, right, or rowing. Yeah. Right? It's like Jordy, Breeze's husband is a rowing coach. I assume they know power when they're in the boat or the water.
I'm not I don't think they do. They have $60,000 carbon fiber boats, but I don't think they know how much power each rower is producing.
Mike:
No. Which is why a lot of them use, like, the erg or the concept too because it gives them hard data all the time. That's especially they don't have access to a course. So But, of
Chris:
course, that's different. That's like a model of the things that you really care about, but it's not presumably, there's not as much or the same skill in the rowing itself when you're on the water.
Mike:
It's different, but it's, again, Probably as close as you're gonna you're gonna get.
Chris:
What about resting metabolic rate? I know this is something else that Pinoy measures is valuable. Does it matter?
Mike:
You can make 2 arguments. I would say yes and no. So how I use it is A lot of clients who their weight loss stalls, unfortunately, tends to be more females than males, although I've definitely seen it in males too. They're utterly convinced because they spent too much time on the Internet that the resting metabolic rate must have just crashed, and they're walking around, like, 800 calories per day. And I could do whatever I want to try to convince them that there's no way in hell that it's 800 calories per day, but they don't really believe you.
If I do a measurement and I put them at rest and I actually get a measurement and I show them that, hey. Yours is, like, 1325. They're like, oh, wow. That's crazy. I didn't know that.
Now We could argue all day, does that radically change what I would do with them? It may be not. But what I've noticed is that They all of a sudden now feel much more compliant, and they listen a lot better. So I like to use data to try to Disproves some of the things that they think are going on. The other hard part is that the equations for resting metabolic rate, They will get you in the ballpark, but I've noticed on an individual level, there's still a fair amount of variability in it.
And so, yeah, you can use those equations as you know, if you look at the studies and if you look at the curves, yeah, standard distribution, all that kind of stuff, they for a population, they're pretty okay. But on the individual level, I just noticed that they kind of break down a fair amount. So, again, that's why using the direct measure, if I find is useful. The next question is, can you radically change your resting metabolic rate? It's not as plastic as what I used to believe.
It it tends to be a little bit more fixed. A lot of that could be related to, you know, sleep and, you know, how much muscle you have and all those kind of things. So it's not something that I'd we do know that Weight loss, if you lose muscle, like, your resting metabolic rate will change. But again, people think when they hear change, they think, oh my god. It dropped by 500 calories.
It's like, no. We're talking Fifty, 70, a 100 calories. It doesn't have these massive swings as much as what people have been led to believe.
Chris:
Interesting. So you can't really change it then is what you're telling me. Okay? What's the biggest change that you've seen?
Mike:
I mean, the biggest change I've ever seen is only a couple 100 calories, Which
Chris:
Oh, really?
Mike:
Could very well be and this is, again, this is individual to individual over a period of time. Now, again, the parts that we don't know is the conditions that kinda go into it. Like, if they didn't have as good a night sleep, does that affect it? We do know there's some Very interesting stuff with the fuel that you use at rest. So one of the things you'll look at with a metabolic heart, like a new breath by breath analysis, is you can get the RER.
So the respiratory exchange ratio,
Chris:
which in English tells you how much fat and
Mike:
how much carbohydrates you're burning. And so a lot of times, that's also the thing that people wanna know. Okay. How many calories am I burning, and where does the source come from? And in the past, I've just done this.
Okay. We're overnight fast. Don't consume anything beforehand. Do it first thing in the morning. And if the number was low, like 0.7, He would say, great.
At rest, you're using about a 100% fat. If it's higher, so 0.85, 50% carbs, 50% fat. If it's 1 or higher, you're a 100% carbohydrates. And so I I did a firm on these tests in the lab and then here too. And then I started getting some weird stuff with, like, Higher end athletes.
So 1 guy in particular, Ryan Baxter, actually, who you know.
Chris:
Ryan's been on the podcast.
Mike:
Yeah. And so he has a Pinoy device, so he was doing measurements at his house. Way.
Chris:
He has to measure his device at home.
Mike:
That's crazy. Great. I'm like, oh, this is so fun. And his RER was coming in at, like, you know, 0.86, 0.89. I'm like, what the heck?
This guy's like legit, you know, single digit body fat. I've seen all his blood work. Like, I do his training. Like, I know his work capacity. I know his output.
I'm like, It doesn't make sense. Mike just broke. Just do it again. Like, the the main machine's weird. Something's messed up.
Does it again. Almost the exact same number. I said, what the hell? Like, this isn't making sense. And so I said, okay.
Get on and just do 50 watts on a bike and just measure it. As soon as he does any exercise, drops to, like, 0.7, 0.72. And as you know, like, 50 watts on a bike is basically Almost nothing.
Chris:
Like, it
Mike:
it's not much output at all.
Chris:
Period. Pedaling. Yeah.
Mike:
Yeah. Just soft pedaling on a bike. There's nothing hard. I'm like, weird. And so I've seen that with a couple other people now too.
And the caveat is these are people who are generally relatively healthy, Who were in a caloric surplus with higher amounts of carbohydrates. So even though we had that 8 to 12 hour fasting period overnight, I don't know if that's enough to change the RMR fuel usage in those people. Because if you didn't take this into context, you would look and you go, this guy is, like, metabolically, something's wrong with him. Right? That doesn't he should be using fat at rest.
So with higher level athletes now, if I see a weird reading, I'll be like, okay. Do this again, but just go, like, 50 watts on a bike or just go for a walk or do some movement. If it doesn't drop down then, okay, now I'm thinking there might be something going on. But in those cases, it's always drop back down and everything is sort of normalized. So, again, can I find any studies that have done this?
No. Can I find any research that's looked at this? No. But it I've seen it enough times now where I think it does explain some of the variability in some of those studies, again, on healthy people that by all other terms are, The metabolic superstars.
Chris:
Okay. Interesting. I'm feeling like I should probably direct people to a previous episode that we've done on metabolic Flexibility rather than we going down Oh, yeah.
Mike:
Yeah. In a rabbit hole
Chris:
of, like, wide as the ARIA No.
Mike:
We went down the Nurture pretty hard there.
Chris:
Yeah. Yeah. Let's pull up there. You know, one one thing I'm interested to hear your thoughts on is biological age. I know that it's reported by the device and, you know, at MBT, we've used the PhenoAge and, you know, know, I've had my own attempts at trying to create a biological age using the NHANES data, and then most of us, you know, have done that linked To the mortality files, you know, can you use supervised machine learning to predict mortality using the end stage?
I think the answer is yes. That yields a model that has skill. And then, you know, you look inside of this model, what the features are most important. So it's like a explainable model. You could call this biological age if you want.
It might be useful for answering that question, you know, where am I at now? Am I getting better? But what what do you think about all that?
Mike:
I mean, I think at some point, we will figure it out. And to your point, I think it depends upon, like, all things, right, as you know better than I do. Like, the data you put in the model is gonna be also determinant. Right. So the model you guys use, the NHANES data is probably the biggest data set we have.
However, you could argue that's Probably of people who are not real healthy. You know, that's just population at wide. And so if I take that data set and I to people who are very active, who have a high VO two max, have all these other things. Are they representative of enough In that data set to give me an accurate prediction. I don't know.
I wonder about that. But then the next question is, okay. Well, we don't have very good data sets on Super healthy people, period, at least to that level. So what would you base it on and how would you kinda figure it out? Like, there's everything from, You know, blood work and waiting different things on algorithms to methylation clocks to whatever.
I my bias, if I were to Pick one, kinda my background's exercise physiology. I would be more interested in an output verification model. Right. So I'd be looking at resting heart rate, HRV, v o two max, some type of body strength, maybe body comp, Like things that are, quote, unquote, more output based because that's gonna give me a better sum of all of the biological functions that go into that As opposed to trying to back regulate and look at all the underlying things. And, again, maybe AI can figure all that stuff out.
And if we had a really good Dataset, I'm sure it probably could, but, again, you're the AI expert, not me on that. But in the meantime, my my bias is I just air more towards Specific outputs because that is the sum of all of those kind of biologic functions.
Chris:
I wouldn't describe myself as an AI expert, but I do recognize the problem you're describing, it's generally referred to as the propensity matching problem. Right?
Mike:
The people
Chris:
in your data are not like that used to train your model are not like the ones that you're making at inference time. And, yeah, we've already seen that with athlete clients. I mean, you, like me, are a Big advocate of protein, and you're gonna see elevated BUN in Yep. People eating adequate protein
Mike:
Creatine on the higher.
Chris:
Yeah. Who knows how much they were? You know, like, they do these food frequency questionnaires. NHANES, maybe they're eating a lot of protein. I don't who knows?
I don't know. Maybe that protein was wrapped with a bun and onions and Ketchup and came from McDonald's. Like, that that could be true too. Like, yeah,
Mike:
I remember get into the self report data. Like, where did the data come from? Like, what was there recall? How accurate is there recall? And Yeah.
You can go really far down that rabbit hole.
Chris:
Yeah. It's mostly nonsense. And then, yeah, we also see it in, liver enzymes, you know, like people who work out, then, like, occasionally, they get and it's highly variable. Sometimes they get elevations of liver enzymes that They may be strongly predictive of very bad things as the BUN would. Right?
Think about kidney failure. Like, you might see that. Right? Like, this is, like, end stage kidney disease in One person, but in others, it just means they had, like, a lot of protein today and then went and had a workout yesterday. Right?
Like, it's not like, these 2 things are not the same. You mentioned Ryan Baxter knew his body composition there, and I'm sure in fact, I know because I've worked with Ryan. Make sure he measured that with DXA. Right? But Yep.
DEXA, like the like everything else we've talked about, it's like, it's kind of a pain to go somewhere to get that measured. What do you think about, you know, our friend and, Like, 2 times, I think podcast guest, Jason Moore, recently launched an app called Sprint. You know about that. He's doing body composition. Do you know about that?
Mike:
Yeah. I know what it is. I don't know how it does it, to be honest, though. But, yeah, I know Jason.
Chris:
Okay. Yeah. So Sprint, you should check it out. Obviously, obviously, yeah, it's Using vision analysis. Right?
So it's a sort of I'm not exactly sure how it works, if I'm honest, but you take pictures from the front and from the side, And then using some sort of image classification, it's giving you body composition, not just body fat, but it's also, like, reporting Android fat and other things. And I think there are some data validating the approach at least, if not, The app specifically. And I talked to Greg Potter recently. You know Greg? And he thinks there are other algorithms that use video that are even more accurate, but that's not I mean, how do you measure body composition with clients typically?
Mike:
You know, some clients I have will do DXA. The caveat you know, talking to, like, Eric Holmes and Grant Tinsley. Lab has done, you know, tons of stuff on DEXA. I had both those guys on the podcast. In the past now with my own clients, I've talked More people off the ledge because they got a DXA 4 to 6 weeks after each other, and the results don't match up with what they were seeing.
So At best, if you're gonna do DEXA, my opinion right now is maybe the most frequent I would do it would be every 6 months. And then ideally, you would do the same dexalocation, the same, you know, whatever you do to lead up to that. There's debate about how much nutrition impacts that. Studies say yes. Some studies say no.
But I have noticed, like, Ryan picked this up too, that he went and did a decks at a different place, And the result was, like, quite a bit different. And I'm like, I've seen enough DEXA scans and pics of, you know, half naked people now throughout my life that I know, Dexter. That was your favorite thing to do. It's like driving.
Chris:
Yeah. And
Mike:
Yeah. It turned out that they this Dexter place wasn't used to doing athletes. And there's an equation in the back that says athlete model or kind of more general population model. They picked the wrong one. When they went back and he had them change that and reoutput it, then everything was fine.
So, again, there's equations in the background that, again, the model is predicted based off of the DEXO 2. So what I do in practice is pictures, circumference, and I actually use daily body weight. So I look a lot at daily body weight and then performance. If you're trending down in body weight and your performance is still going up, cool. We're probably doing pretty good.
Like, the odds of you losing muscle will be very low. Again, you could argue that they're doing all new exercises, and maybe they're new to exercises and neural adaptation and blah blah blah, all this stuff. If that trend continues, I'm not that worried. If performance starts dropping off really hard and we're having them in a very extreme caloric deficit, Okay. Maybe there's some muscle loss.
Again, hard to say. But the nice part about body weight is it obviously isn't telling you body comp, But you can get the measurement every day. And so I have a highly repeatable thing that even with, like, probably the worst scale you pick up is Probably accurate within half a pound or a pound. Right? The accuracy of even the worst measurement system is pretty good.
And then I'll have them do conference measurements using, like, a myotape, some more, you know, kinda physique clients as a relative strength clients may do pictures, that type of thing. It just depends on where they're at. But I think the the scale and performance are very underutilized, And they're very easily accessible pieces of equipment that people can get, and they don't need any real skill to do it. And the last part I've noticed too is that when someone's trending down and their body weight doesn't change within, like, half a pound or less, Most of the time, they're also reached a plateau in just being stuck. So that variability that they see day to day measurement, For whatever reason, that appears to go away.
And so I look at the average, I look at the trend, and I just eyeball the variability change. And what I've noticed over the years of looking at frigging hundreds or probably thousands of data points is that when that variability goes away and they're weighing in at, like, The 131.5, 131.7, 131.3, and they're, like, complaining that just nothing's moving, The variability went away, where normally they were maybe 133.9, you know, 134. It would vary a little bit each day. So that's something I've noticed too. I'll look for that and see if the variability is kinda disappearing.
And I know we're, like, really tight on a time Schedules, they have a competition or something they have to perform. I'll be more aggressive on changes to calories and exercise than waiting for it to completely plateau.
Chris:
You don't worry about the negativity bias. I heard where was it? I think it might have been on Dan Pardy's Human OS podcast back in the day. I heard Dan Ariely, the famous psychologist, talk about shaper scale. Do you know about that?
Or it didn't report a number on the device, just a light that showed that you were headed in the right direction if your Goal was weight loss or fat loss. Yeah. People really want. But do you not run into that with your clients? You like measuring their weight every day, and, like, every time they see a number move in the wrong direction, they're like, Shit.
And then whenever they see it, like, the sort of you know, the criticism, in which case, the weight is going up is like Velcro, right, like really stiff. And then the green lights are like Teflon. Flaunt. They just, like, bounce right off. Do you not run into that with clients?
Mike:
I have. I mean and and I have so to me, it's like, okay. If the way it is constantly disturbing your state, Then we'll have a discussion about it and see what we wanna do. What I won't do is drop to only doing it once a week because that number will fluctuate so much that I don't even know if I'm making the correct decisions or not. So it's either, okay.
Let's do some other measurements. Let's maybe not even do it. Let's Try and pair favorite jeans every 8 weeks or let's do something else completely different. If it's completely destroying your state and we can't change it, then, yeah, I'm not gonna have them do a body weight. Another tip I got from my friend Ali Gilbert and Luke Lehman is I'll have them switch it to kilograms because nobody in the US knows their weight in kilograms.
Chris:
Oh, no. That's what works for me.
Mike:
You do, but the average person's like, oh, I don't know what the hell this is. You know? I've tried to get people to put sticky notes Over their scale and have it directly reported in the chronometer. I've done that a few times. I've had in worst cases, their spouse Weigh them and and old school before we had digital things that would help us, like, have them report it back to me.
There's ways around it, and they all have their pros and cons. You know?
Chris:
That's amazing. Well, there's a couple of questions. I wanna be you gave me an hour of your time, and I've already taken you an hour of your time. But so the question, what workout should I do today? And I had Paul Larson Recently, talk about his Athletica dot AI
Mike:
Oh, nice. Which I
Chris:
think is, like, really interesting technology for endurance athletes. Well, I mean, you'll What are you doing for this now? Are you, like, are you just creating customized plans for everyone? Do you have cookie cutter plans available? How does it work?
Mike:
Yeah. So I probably spent too long creating completely custom plans for everyone, which god, is that a monster pain in the ass? You know, because, like, to me, when I when I started, I was like, okay. This person's an individual. They're paying me a lot of money to do this custom, and This is before I even put stuff online.
I did old school spreadsheets. I draw everything out by hand. It would literally take me, like, 2 to 3 hours to do it. And then Probably maybe 3 or 4 years ago when I was kinda forced into the 21st century and using software online just to make my life easier, I said, okay. I've gotta, you know, use this new software.
I've gotta take all my old spreadsheets and put them into this new program. And so I said, okay. I'm gonna give myself a week. I'm gonna go through all the old programs. I'm, like, maybe I should look to see, like, was I doing the same thing over and over?
And it turns out, like, on my own analysis of, like, 10 years of data, I was like, wow. Like, 70% of the stuff For at least the 1st phase was almost the same or it followed a very similar pattern. I was like, oh, crap. And so what I did then is I created templates based off of what I had done before for, like, a high level endurance athlete, high level cross athlete, Strongman competitor. Like, I had these kind of archetypes based on actual real people I had coached.
And then my thought pattern was the extremes will inform the means. So if I'm good on the extreme end of the spectrum, I can look at that program and I can take stuff out to kinda get it down to, you know, where that person might be. I can't Take an average program and scale it up to someone doing a pro strong memory. Right? It just you kinda have to just start over.
It just doesn't scale up. And so once I did that, and then I said, okay. Well, how do I know if I'm right? So I came up and I read it all my assessments. So On the high end, there's, like, a whole week of assessments from a power output, breathing, range of motion, HRV, resting heart rate, or Whatever.
And then that will inform how I tweak the template so that the template kinda starts the same, and I have an idea of where they need to go. But then that assessment will change where they're at, and then that assessment customizes it to them.
Chris:
Okay. And is this like could put you still got work with your 1 on 1 in order to get access to this. Right?
Mike:
Yeah. I do some 1 on 1 work. Not a lot. I limit it to, like, 12 people. And I've got a course that I do for the FluxDive mentorship where I kinda teach people how to do online training for most people.
Because the other part I realized Miss, I was spending way too long writing these programs because I would I even still do this sometimes. I read them out on, like, This is how old school I am. I have, like, big notebooks, and I write it out in a notebook. And then I would put it online, but the part that I never Fully realized was, well, what parameters am I changing each week? So for example, I would do a lot of changing of, total number of volume of work.
And so I would go in on each little exercise and change the volume. So I was spending, like, 10 minutes just to change the volume for a workout for a week. I'm like, well, that's stupid because I would change it normally for most exercises. So then I realized if I just change the volume at the top, I get the same effect, but it takes me literally, like, 90 less time. So I figured out what are the loading patterns that I use over and over again, and the loading will tend to change per day, Not per exercise.
There's some exceptions to that. So that way I can just make a little note at the top of each day, and that saved me, Oh god. Hours of time extrapolated over, you know, 10 to 15 clients. There was no difference to the client. They got the exact same output.
It was the same thing they were doing. I just realized I'm like, oh, I can make my life easier doing this process.
Chris:
Okay. And so For someone listening, like, so the best way to get access to this is what? Right? You've only got 12 coaching spots. Maybe they're all taken.
Define a coach that's been trained by you. I didn't even know that you were doing that.
Mike:
Yeah. You can just send me an email. Like, I'm probably Okay. So what I did before is I had The FluxDive mentorship, which was 6 months. So I did 1 week of business I did so week 1 was business, and then it was online assessment and training, A mindset and then a personal development.
And then those would cycle each month. So each month, you'd have 1 topic from there. And mean, I have, like, biweekly calls, and I have, like, double 20 minute modules. What I'm gonna probably test out this next year is splitting that into either, I'll probably do those 2 as, like, intensive, like, 6 week courses then. That's what I'm probably thinking.
Chris:
Well, that I mean, that was gonna be my next question. I mean, I've worked with you, and that was my I mean, I know what I'm doing today because you told me what I'm doing, but Yeah. I'm doing it right. Like, is that I have no idea what I'm doing right. Mike's not here now.
Is that enough weight? Or, well, I guess, maybe you've been told with the weights stuff. But is my form correct? Like, what do you do? I mean, endurance stuff is easier, I think.
Right? Now you got power meter on your bicycle. Call, like, you know, like, if you got wattage targets and you're hitting those Yep. Your heart rate or whatever it is, it's like pretty easy to know that you're hitting those. But With this with the strength training, it's, like, way harder, don't you think?
So how do you know? Especially for endurance athletes who are kinda naive to Yeah. Strengths. Right? Like, how do they know whether they're doing it right?
Mike:
I do a lot of video. So I'd be like, hey. Give me a video of that. Post it below. Yeah.
I use TrueAccord for that. Like, when we worked with you, I did a lot of heart rate variability. If they have an aura, you can cross check aura. You've a
Chris:
body temperature will run. If that's going backwards to the where am I now and am I getting Better. Right? Like, you know you think you know that whether I've got good form in my the exercises I've been forming just from my HRV data?
Mike:
You you can kind of back calculate it. So for example, I had a client where aura was fine, sleep was fine, nutrition was on point, But every day after they did a heavy squat, their HRV would just be trashed. And I'm like, Okay. And so I started thinking it was the loading of the squat. So we pulled back on the loading, didn't change.
I get a video, and It was a very horrendous looking squat. In that case, there can be a little bit higher stress around their system. You'll see more of a drop in HRV. It doesn't always show up that way, but exercise form can be a stressor, especially for I've noticed, like, axial loaded exercises. Another way you can get around it too is by having them do a range of motion test.
So, like, hey. Take your baseline range of motion, toe touch, do an exercise, measure it again. If your range of motion is always getting worse, that means that your body is not liking that exercise. So let's change it. Let's go to a b stance.
Let's changed the loading or let's drop it entirely, and then we'll come back and readdress that later.
Chris:
Oh, that's fascinating. That's really interesting. And you reminded me, we're off to Costa Rica on Monday. Last time we went to Costa Rica in 2019, it was to stay at Ben House's retreat center.
Mike:
Yeah. Yeah.
Chris:
You've been there, haven't you?
Mike:
Yes. I've been there many times. Beautiful place.
Chris:
Yeah. It is beautiful. And I remember we were there with some endurance athlete clients, I would include myself in this cohort. Right? Like, Ben's like, well, let me see.
Before I load you up, let me see you do this. He's like, okay. Let me see if you do this. Okay. Let me see you do this.
It's like, yeah. I don't think you wanna put any weight on that. You know?
Mike:
Yeah.
Chris:
And I think that's kinda typical of endurance athletes.
Mike:
Yeah. And I've gotten wiser with programming that over the years. Right? So rarely do I ever program a back squat. Like, if it's an endurance athlete, like my favorite squatting motions, either a goblet squat or double kettlebell front squat, it's just much harder to mess it up.
And Depending on where they're at, they probably don't need to be loaded pretty heavy. I mean, if you can do 232 KG kettlebells and knock out, you know, 12 reps of the, you You know, front squat on those, that's pretty damn impressive. It is not elite level status, but that's a much harder task than what I think people realize. I think with loading, you can kinda because after you do this long enough, you'll see what patterns break down first, and so I tend not to Programmed those nearly as much.
Chris:
Okay. Alright. One last bonus question because you just can't resist. It's a gadget. You know, like, us tech people, we love gadgets.
Yeah. Even though they always end up in the gadget graveyard eventually after we buy them. I still love talking about them and buying them and stuff. What about the Moxie oxygen sensor? I've heard you talk about this a lot.
What is it? What can it do for you? Is it any good? Can you, like is it something that can inform your decision making?
Mike:
I actually like it. I've known Roger as the CEO there for many years. I saw him present in the medical device conference years ago when it first came out. And, basically, what it is, it's a nearest device. So you put it over the muscle and by using near infrared light, Then it'll tell you the oxygen utilization of a local muscle.
And so the thing that blew me away, Todd, Probably 70 years ago now was when I first saw the device, I think it was Aaron Davis from Evolv. They put this person on a rower, And they said, okay. Let's do a 30 second wind gate. Right? So roller maxed, hard as you can for 30 seconds.
They have the MOXI device on and they have the display. So he starts at, you know, 85% oxygen level in the muscle. By the end of the 30 seconds, the oxygen level was down to, like, 11%. And I'm sitting there going, well, hold the the this device is a piece of shit. There's no I was told this is anaerobic exercise.
You're not using the oxygen during these High intensity output things. And long story short, that messed me up for, like, 6 years to try to figure out, like, what the hell is going on. It turns out the device is accurate, that you are always constantly using oxygen in the background even if something is, quote, anaerobic. But once you understand that, That allows you to, like, kind of the next level of programming of okay. Is it a central imitator?
Right? Is it cardiac limitator? Or is it kind of a peripheral imitator? Those it's just a high level. And so if I put someone on a rower and let's say let's have you do 30 seconds.
Let's say they're doing a 2 k. Right? I had this happen the other day. They're doing a 2 k. Their SMO two starts at 85% after a good warm up.
If they're 1 minute into it and they're already at, like, 12%. That's gonna be an absolutely brutal two k for them. Right? Because your muscles operate at such a low o two environment already
Chris:
You've gone out
Mike:
to your mom. Who has more of a gradual decline. Again, the caveat being these 2 people had the same output. That's the part people forget. We're comparing people who have the same output.
And so it gives you an idea of peripherally, like local musculature, like what's going on. Is it a technique thing? Is it a training thing? You know? And you can go further down the rabbit hole from there.
Chris:
I see. And so how would this inform your decision making? What would you say to Two people.
Mike:
Yeah. So it's different. So the rate limiter is gonna be different. Right? So if I've got, like, a guy who just like, his s m 2 SM02 just Rashes initially I'm like, okay.
We're probably not gonna, 1, drive you into the paint doing 2 k's all the time and just leave it down there. We might do what I call a, I got this from Evan Pycon, like a progressive interval. So take a 4 minute interval, and at the last 30 seconds of that 4 minute interval, I wanna see your SMO too, like, as low as it can go, but I don't wanna see it until that point. I want you to play with your pace and get used to Seeing what output you can get progressively getting down to that low level. Right?
So I'm training the blood flow. And the other part I'm gonna look at too is On your technique, when you're coming back, right, I'm just using normal speak, not rower speak. The one I'm bringing the handle towards me, That's obviously muscle contraction. Right? But when you bring the handle back, I literally want you to think, relax.
Because what do I wanna happen at that point? I want those vessels and that musculature to relax and not compress the shit out of all those vessels. If its tension's still on and it's compressing those vessels, my SMO 2 is gonna stay low because I've basically hampered blood flow. So I want to see, can I get the muscle to relax more and get the same output and over time, potentially better output? So what I should see is for that output, my SMO 2 shouldn't bottom out as hard because I'm getting more blood flow now to that muscle.
So when we go to train again and we go to do a competition or a test, now I can get a higher level of output from that because we've gotten Higher levels of output during training.
Chris:
I see. Very technical. I see the use case. Okay. And how often do you use this device when working with athletes?
This something you're using every day? Or
Mike:
It depends. It depends on how much of a pain in the ass they wanna put into
Chris:
the train, to be honest. Okay. Okay. Got it.
Mike:
Because it's a little bit of a pain. And after a while, like, They'll know, like, what outputs are, you know so I may say, like, giving out those
Chris:
heart rate. Right? Like, I know I I don't need to keep wearing a heart rate monitor to know what my heart rate is. Right?
Mike:
I'm gonna
Chris:
show you kind of learn the association.
Mike:
Yep. The caveat, although this part kinda bugs me, I do think high level athletes might use different compensation mechanisms depending upon different levels of fatigue. So initially, when I started testing this, I would have the Pinoy device on. The Pinoy integrates with the Moxie. Because the longest time, I was just like, okay.
I wanna know Local muscle, what's going on? But I also wanna know centrally what's going on too. Because if I just start hyperventilating, I just started getting rid of a ton of c o two. That's gonna change the local muscle effect. Right?
It's the Bohr effect. Right. So they're related to each other. And if you don't watch the person or don't know what their breathing rate was, you may assume that it's a local issue and it might not be or vice versa.
Chris:
I see. So when
Mike:
I have the POA, I can look at respiratory rate, and we got RER. I can look at flow rates. I can look at all this stuff going in and out. Them as a whole central unit. I'll put a moxie on the right quad, left quad, and then their deltoid.
So if I see a change in a nonactive muscle group, That may tell me they've got a cardiac limitation and that the brain goes, well, screw this. We don't need any blood flow to this little Deltoid muscle, like, we need more blood flow to the quads. Right? So that may give you an idea of a central adaptation. The hard part with all of that to say is, I'm not convinced you could test an athlete once and have that always be their limiter for a period of time.
The which is annoying. Right? Because my Yeah. My thought process going into it was, great. You come out here.
We'll do all this testing. Boom. We find your limiter. Great. We destroy your limiter for, like, 8 weeks.
Boom. Now you're better. But what I've realized is I think depending on fatigue and depending on other things, your limiter might change on a Day by day or week by week basis, and I don't have a good handle on that, to be a 100% honest. So that would make the argument of training With amoxic, so you're training to just like training the heart rate. Right?
But now I'm training to another physiologic Thing that's connected to performance. So if I'm training, okay, I want you to bottom out as hard as you can at the end of 30 seconds. Okay. Go again once you hit 85 and then go again. Right?
So just like depletion intervals. It wouldn't matter what your kinda your status or your adaptation is that day, because I'm still going to those physiologic parameters anyway.
Chris:
I'm excited.
Mike:
Be the argument of why you would use it daily for training.
Chris:
I see. Well, Mike, you've been incredibly generous with your time as always. And to remind the listener, the flex diet certificate program is open now and early now for that maybe only 1 more time this year, right, so people
Mike:
Yeah. Possibly later this year, but right now, January 15th through 22nd, it's just flexdiet.com.
Chris:
Excellent. Well, thank you so much. Is there anything else you want people to know about?
Mike:
No. That's about it. If they want more information from me, I have a daily newsletter That I try to make someone interesting and not quite as geeky as this, but we do get pretty geeky there. You can go to mike t nelson.com. And there'll be a way you can hop on the free newsletter there.
That's where probably, like, 90% of my content goes out to the newsletter.
Chris:
Awesome. Thanks so much, Mike. I really appreciate you. Thank you.
Mike:
Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate it.
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